I really missed the bandwagon on GI Joe. Well, that's not really true at all. I missed out on the kind of GI Joe that we're talking about here today, what I like to call the "superheroes in the military" GI Joe. See, when I was at the perfect age for collecting GI Joes they were only making the real-life 12 inch figures. I loved them and had a bunch: a Marine with swampland camos, a firefighter with a scruffy beard, and my first and favorite: the snow patrol Army soldier.
But I realize that to a lot of people GI Joe is something entirely different. Something about the constant threat of Cobra, something about lots of crazy battles, something about a mysterious guy named Snake Eyes. For awhile I was curmudgeonly. When my beloved 12 inch figures with "real" cloth garments and meticulously crafted scale weapons got pushed off the shelves by Dukes and Destros I was pissed. I'll have to look up when exactly that happened. All of a sudden, after laying dormant for a long time, Hasbro brought back the old characters. This was all a threat to "my" GI Joe and I didn't like it.
Well, plenty of time has passed and I'm over it. Sure, I wouldn't mind if Hasbro started doing their military line again, but that's fine. No, I don't have any plans to watch that movie that came out a few years ago, but I'm getting to be a fan of the "Yo, Joe!" part of the franchise now.
And that's all because of IDW's reprint of the old Marvel GI Joe series. I just read volume one of the Classic GI Joe series, and yep, I'm starting to understand the appeal. This was really my first experience with these characters. Literally they were just the names of action figures to me before I read this. I have no experience with the 80's cartoon.
You have to just enjoy GI Joe for its simplicity. A bunch of cool people fight a never ending war against a freaky evil legion. They seem to fight every day of the week. Cobra always sets up some kind of scheme and it always winds up getting ruined by the good guys. In this book they fight everywhere: two issues feature Manhattan battles, they fight in snow, they fight underwater, and (my favorite) they fight in space when a Cobra missile is launched from undersea to blow up a space shuttle that is carrying GI Joe members.
I have a favorite character already: Scarlet. She proves over and over again that she's more than tough enough to hang out with the guys in GI Joe, and she's got plenty of smarts. And she does martial arts and wields a crossbow. Plus one and plus one there.
Snake Eyes: well yeah, I see why he's so wildly popular now. I mean, just from the visuals he's pretty neat (and I remember how many accessories the figure came packaged with) but as the mystery unravelled I really did want to learn more about him. That was actually a really good issue...a guy named Dr. Venom had Snake Eyes tied up to a torture device from which he could extract a person's thoughts. The goal was to learn the location of the Joes' secret base. But Snake Eyes is so tough that he forces a bunch of other memories to be seen, and Dr. Venom is livid. It was a great way to provide backstory.
And that would be the cue to mention Larry Hama, whom I probably should have mentioned in this post's first paragraph. Hama is known as the architect behind the GI Joe comics. He wrote just about every issue of the comic and always made sure that it was an actual story rather than just an excuse to showcase the latest toys that 80’s generation kids could hope to find at K-Mart that month. What I saw in Classic GI Joe Volume One was the beginning of a saga. Things build up over the issues and most of the characters are pretty interesting. All due credit to Mr. Hama.
As a complete outsider to GI Joe, I was surprised to see that a lot of the characters I knew already weren't around at the inception of the GI Joe comic. There's no Duke or Destro yet, and I considered those guys to be pretty fundamental to the Joe mythology. Oh, and I always liked the way Heavy Duty and Storm Shadow looked too, but didn't get a chance to learn anything about them because they weren't around in issues #1-10. But I realized that these first ten issues were only the beginning of a comic that would go on to have a very long run, telling a very long story. So I guess I'll be glad to read some more and find out just when all of these characters were introduced.
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